2012 // postcards – installation

Will we believe that Antun Mihanović got his inspiration for the verses of the future national anthem of Croatia at the spot on which in Zeljenjak, on the Klanjec to Kumrovec road, in 1935 the association Braća Hrvatskoga Zmaja put up a monument to the words of the Croatian anthem, reworked and rephrased several times to date? The three video fragments of Ana Hušman are united by text and subtext about the celebrated features of the homeland of someone’s own forebears and a staging of the learning of a language that is called the mother tongue. The search for fragments of one’s own identity is articulated in the form of an artificial conversational staged so as to bring out the separation of body, speech and language. The descendants of emigrants come from distant areas in order to see for themselves. To experience what they have heard. And so they set out on excursions to Zelenjak, Klanjec and Kumrovec, after the national anthem that in another staging turns into just another versification. In it the “Our lovely homeland” becomes “Lovely is the mountain” in the live musical performance of the three animals from the crown of the Croatian coat of arms: the lion, marten and golden goat with red horns and hoofs. Literal animation or more precisely, personification of symbols, turns the legend of the homeland of the ancestors into a fairy tale, taking us back again to the matter of the content of the postcard. Is its content the image that is seen, what is written on the back of the printed picture, or the voice that a hundred years later (silently) pronounces the fragments of a broken text of numerous messages that arrive from afar?